Reading the news you might think shuttering USAID and science funding will do something useful towards balancing the budget. It won’t.

COMBINED these two represent about 1.5% of the US budget, about $140bn dollars. They are the yellow boxes in the first graph (total 2024 spending). $140bn is not a small number, but our spend was $9.7tn with $4.9 in revenue.

We are spend roughly 2x what we bring in.

It is not possible to kill the deficit unless we cut benefits in social security and medicare, and probably reduce defense, those are about $4.3tn combined.

Not a popular conversation.

Shuttering the ENTIRE Federal government will not balance the budget. If we cut 100% of government spending that is NOT social security, medicare, defense and interest it would not cover the deficit.

It is not possible to balance the budget without slashing benefits we give to people in retirement, raising taxes, or both.

This has been true for years.

The second graph is spending since 2000. The yellow line is where we were headed up until spending flattened in the first half of the 2010s, before picking back up again. Revenue has not kept up.

So what is the point of this post?

Only information. I spent over an hour looking at data and graphs to make sure what I was writing was both accurate and a fair.

I certainly am not suggesting that we cut all entitlements and defense spending and call it a day. Or just double taxes.

There is always more context that can be added to the discussion and everybody has an opinion. But, to quote Billy Beane, “data is a fact.”

Plus, I thought I could probably lose all of my friends in a single post by suggesting that we need to cut entitlements, cut defense and raise taxes to balance the budget

Sources: USASpending.gov, FiscalData.treasury.gov, fred.stlouisfed.org